To date, various different machines have been used for cubing or dicing deformable products. One common type of machine used for cubing or dicing a deformable product is a harp style cutter. The harp style cutter is most commonly used to cut moderately deformable products, such as cheese, meats, bakery products, potato products, and the like. Harp style cutters use a plurality of wires or wire blades stretched taught within a rigid harp frame to cut the deformable product into individual pieces. Generally, either hydraulic or pneumatic cylinders are used to force the harp frame over a slab or loaf of deformable product, thereby severing the slab or loaf into a plurality of slices, blocks, or cubes. Harp style cutters, however, are prone to breakage of the harp wires, are labor intensive to operate, and require frequent maintenance. Traditional harp style cutters typically require as many as two operators per machine. Moreover, these harp style cutters cannot satisfactorily cut soft or high moisture products, such as, for example, mozzarella cheese, while providing uniform, smooth profile cut blocks of the cheese.
Another type of known dicing device employs a ganged cutting assembly (i.e., a plurality of circular cutting blades axially aligned on a shaft) to cut a product into strips, and a mechanism for cutting the product transversely to the feed direction. Several different variations of this type of dicing machine are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,193,272 to Bernard, U.S. Pat. No. 4,095,926 to Paul, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,598,163 to Urschel. In particular, the '272 patent discloses a system for producing discrete chilled blocks of product having pre-selected weights. The system comprises a plurality of circular slicers disposed coaxially along a shaft to cut the product into strips. An elongated knife blade cutter periodically severs blocks of the product. In a dicing machine of this type, having the slicers axially aligned on a single shaft, the product is forced past all of the slicers simultaneously. This arrangement is problematic for several reasons. First, as the product is being cut, each slicer blade displaces a small amount of the product. Since the product is simultaneously sliced by all of the slicer blades, the amount of product displaced by all of the slicer blades is significant. Consequently, the product must be deformed—i.e., compacted—to compensate for the space filled by the plurality of slicer blades. This compaction of the product increases the force required to feed the product through the slicers and may exacerbate the adherence of the product to the slicer blades. A second problem with this type of ganged cutter is that when the product comes into contact with all the slicers simultaneously, the product will encounter substantial resistance to conveyance. Thus, a substantial force will be applied to the shaft on which the slicers are mounted, which has a propensity to smear the product, and may plug and/or damage the dicing machine. As a result of these two problems, soft and/or tacky products may not be properly conveyed through the ganged cutting assembly.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,537,494 to Orlowski discloses a slicing machine for vegetables, having a series of pairs of rotary slicer blades the vegetable encounters as it moves downstream. Each pair of the slicer blades is set successively closer together, as the vegetable moves in the downstream direction. The pairs of slicer blades are spaced apart from one another, in the feed direction, a distance greater than the diameter of the blades, and intervening spacers are placed between the pairs of slicer blades to receive and position the vegetables to be cut. One disadvantage of this arrangement is that, as the product reaches the trailing (upward rotating) edge of the slicer blades, the product will be biased in the upward direction by the upward motion of the trailing edge of the slicer blades. Thus, some tacky and/or soft products will not be effectively stabilized and may tend to ride-up on the slicer blades, where they will no longer be conveyed properly. Furthermore, because the slicer blades are spaced at such a great distance apart in the feed direction, the overall length of the slicing machine is correspondingly great. The large size of this configuration makes it difficult or impossible to effectively mount the machine above or upstream of another machine in an assembly line.
From this, it is apparent that there is a need in the art for an improved dicing apparatus and method for dicing a deformable product into cubes or blocks.